The Twincam seems like "The Homer" of camcorders. Some senior person at Sharp had a relative that had been begging to design a product and they did whatever that person said no matter how dumb.
Or it could be designed by committee.. we asked 1000 people type thing.. And it was multiple choice box ticking.. then the results landed on some designers desk with a lot of "it must be" parameters..
I was just recently introducing my children to the (good old) episodes of The Simpsons on Disney+ and: yes hello to the Homer car episode.. All comments on similarity between camcorder and car are best true!
Good you said broken. I tried opening similar cameras as a kid. One of the few devices that were hard to put back together. There are so much parts in these things from that time.
@@MrSpacelyy cameras in general are a bitch to repair because of this. It's even worse today. Usually there's a very specific order to the dis- and reassembly of these.
That was a great demo of the poor dynamic range of those cameras. Shooting in noon sun meant the person's eyes would be black holes and their cheeks would be overexposed. They made you appreciate the flat even light of cloudy days.
Yeah my gf was helping me shoot and she said "half your face is completely black" and I said "if it looked any other way I'd be lying, this is what these cameras looked like"
1. The design looks a little like japanese minidisc and hifis from sharp, so it might be targeted to their market. 2. The reason they built it is the same as today's multi-lens feature on modern phones. But back then it was the other way around. Everybody wanted to shoot from distance so zoom with a long focal length was a must. On the other hand this usually ruled out extra wide angle which is much more practical in Japan or Europe where spaces are tighter. If you wanted to have all the family in the frame it was either the wide converter or... this.
ooh, I have a Sharp MD-MS722 that looks like a slightly less shitty application of that design philosophy (it's metal, and they include a wheel that's actually useful for text input)
At the time people said Sony, Hitachi and Panasonic’s success in the west was because they understood how to tone down the designs for western sensibilities. Sharp were often Japanese market leaders (or inventors of things, like LCD) and designed for Japanese and Asian markets first. That’s what this is.
"It's really ugly" You take back those words, you charlatan! You knave! That is the most single perfect specimen of camcorder to ever possibly exist! Your mere mortal mind cannot comprehend it's forward looking aesthetic!
Actually, the more you rag on the camera’s aesthetics,… the more I’m starting to really appreciate it’s aesthetics. It’s kind of wild that it made it through production in the first place.
Nice that it has a line input option. I hear that was quite a common feature elsewhere in the world, but it was a feature that was removed from nearly all UK versions. To do with the import tax I believe - if the camera had input sockets it was classed as a VCR, which meant more import tax had to be paid on it. Result - none but the most expensive UK camcorders had video input sockets.
I can't remember on the MX7, but certainly on the Viewcams, the video input was present but disabled in software. You could reprogram a UK spec (suffix H) machine to be Australian spec (suffix X, IIRC), which was identical apart from allowing external video input and recording.
That was a real bone of contention when mini-DV arrived, because UK models had DV input disabled in firmware (unless you bought the most expensive models). That led to an explosion in small specialist companies offering cracks to reprogram the firmware in your device to re-enable DV input. They weren't cheap either, I think I paid about £70 to get my first mini-DV camcorder (Panasonic NV-DA1) hacked for DV input, and that was the typical market rate. I remember the hack arrived on a 3.5" floppy, and the label on it warned that if you tried to use it more than once, it would damage the camcorder, presumably by deliberately screwing up the firmware.
@@dunebasher1971 I’m 85% sure they just said it, knowing that most people, especially back then, found this stuff daunting and inscrutable and would be scared off by such a threat
Dude you cover some of the most interesting niche video tech on UA-cam, thanks for taking the time to share this stuff. Still incredibly envious of that WVHS deck bruv, but happy it is in good hands.
That's also the same technique used in 3D Modeling... By adding Details the occlusion effect is more noticeable therefore looking much more photorealistic when rendering.
10:00 A PiP input would require a digital frame sync, and those were very expensive at that time. The two sensors in the camera are already genlocked, so they don't need a frame sync.
8:53 - curious P in P function: The only reason I can think of why this might have been useful is that back in the day, some of us (old guys who used to own camcorders and sometimes used them in a more advanced manner) used to occasionally set up an ad hoc studio at home, taping something while monitoring it on a TV set attached to the composite jacks. In such a setup, a PiP that showed a close-up of the focal point of the video and could be moved from left to right, could almost make sense with the video in progress being monitored on a bigger screen. Still, I have to admit, it's a barely useful and underwhelming implementation of PiP. It really smacks of a feature added mainly because someone was trying to figure out what to do with an otherwise unused spot on the side of the camcorder.
Same here! It conveys a "Steampunk" vibe and feel. If only the buttons were metallic and copper. I can't really down on it because it comes from an era of gaudy. A lot of electronics of the 90s had that techie feel. But while it has a lot going against it, it has features that were not widely available in the 90s.
They "experiment" a lot of concept consumer products in Japan. Some are specific to the Japanese customer market. I have seen cell phone models that were never sold outside of Japan back in the 90's.
As someone who was a young adult in that time, the purpose of the different look is to make it look like fancy equipment, and the reserved look of the other camcorders resembled "Cheap" products. You want fancy stuff, make it look fancy with all the "Different" "Metals", and gaudy designs. Basically, it was nothing more than a status statement of the times.
The Sharp actually looks like they were trying to take design cues from professional TV cameras. The aesthetics of it look really similar to the one I operated for a while when I helped with the TV broadcast for a church we attended.
I honestly half-suspect that this was intended for small-budget TV crews. "This is Bob Boblinger, reporting from Farmer Dan's hay barn in back-country Nebraska, where he wants to speak with us about an exciting discovery in the world of manure."
External PIP would have been hugely complex due to synchronising the video signals. PIP between two CCDs was easier because they would have been running from the same timing source.
Point of reference: $1,700 USD in 1992 would be the equivalent to over $3,300 USD in "today's money". I'd play with it at Circuit City or Incredible Universe, but that's about it.
Same here. I fall asleep to these sometimes and I don’t mean that in a negative sense…more that I don’t want loud obnoxious videos at night and I keep watching CRD until I’m dropping my phone on my face.
dude i love your channel. this is the real spirit of youtube. what it always was meant to be. broadcasting yourself and the things you like to talk about. beeing yourself no matter of audience size, and talking about things that matter to yourself are qualities that are rare these days. instead of pandering to the audience to encurage growth you just do what you like to do. i envy you, bravo!
I always had the feeling that 1990s Sharp (and Casio) had products that, instead of being released, just escaped from the R&D department. Like someone from Marketing walked in to the R&D department, saw something fancy but very unfinished and demanded a working marketable product within three months. Maybe they bought an OEM shell (modified for two lenses) and crammed their tech in it? This idea, given a bit more thought, would be quite nice. It could have become a nice digital sports finder, where you had a wide angle view of the whole scene and a pip view of the actual frame, so you could see things happen out of view without getting your eyes off the viewfinder.
When you said, "escaped" I pictured someone forgetting to close the window before they left for the day and the thing got out the window and onto store shelves.
Twelve-year-old me was obsessed with this camcorder when it was advertised on the Home Shopping Club (now HSN). I distinctly recall a demonstration video in which a boy was batting in a baseball game. The wide shot showed him standing at the plate, while a close-up shot of his face was superimposed. I found this _incredibly_ cool. My recollection is that the unit cost only about $100 (about $200 in today's money) more than an otherwise-similar single-lens Sharp camcorder.
come on now, we all know this just some very clever VFX, as if any company would release such a bizarre product (secretly I want one just so I can take it apart and strap the bits to my head then run around pretending to be a Borg)
I love you man, you're the most wonderful nerd I've ever had the pleasure of consuming the content of. I hope you continue to be as excellent far into the future!
I remember having a go on one of these way back when they were a thing & the process of lining up wide & tele lenses “ on the fly” seemed much like spinning plates whilst unicycling.Kudos for thinking outside the box even if actual use was insanely awkward. Love your video. Very best wishes.
I *had* one of these when I was in high school! It was amazing. So many edit-in-camera options. The audio quality on the thing was astounding. I had the opposite reaction to the aesthetics at the time. :)
I worked for a Sharp service agent in the UK between 1993-1994, just as the Viewcam range was launched.. We had lots of MX7's come in for warranty repair, and also the cheaper VL-M4 that had a tiny B&W CRT viewfinder and a built-in video light in place of the second lens. I still have my old VL-H400H Viewcam in the loft somewhere. Thanks for the memories!
How many capacitors does the VL-MX7 have? and How many of its circuit boards have SMD caps on them? I'm asking because I just got one recently and want to save it from the recycle bin. Does its circuitry look exactly like the VL-M4? and in advance I know there's a disassembly video on it.
I reflexively clicked the Like button 2 seconds in, because I was so excited to be among the first people to see a new CRD video! :D I've now seen the whole video and it was delightful. Thank you.
@@CathodeRayDude What looked good in the 90s is definitely different from what looks good now (I'm old). Back then I bet people would see that awkward magnifying box on the screen showing a close up of their child's face in a big school auditorium and think it was incredible, just like we thought the star-swipe was incredible.
That was my thought, too. Put this on a tripod up high in the stands at a high school football game. You can catch the snap with a zoom, then switch to the wide angle to see where the receivers go. It seems so perfect for this use case -- on paper at least -- that I'm surprised that you found no marketing materials that suggested it.
Actually I'm capturing a video made in the 90's with this camera and transferred to S-VHS, from some friends that played rock music and I have to say that, besides the poor quality of the video 8 image, the camera had the ability to change between the lenses in real time, and have one of them focusing the whole scene, while the other could be offering a close shot of it, which you could monitor previously through the viewfinder, and make the change, say, when the guitar solo began, and have the guitarist instantly on close-up, even allowing some kind of basic graphic transitions between both images. And the built-in mic sounded pretty good too, with a surprising stereo image. I borrowed it from a friend and I have no clue what happened to it, but it was a nice toy that has brought me nice memories...
I remember this one when it came out - it managed to impress me back in the day. BTW, this was styled to look like 8mm film gear. And it does look quite bit like a bolex-paillard film projector, although much cheesier.
I get a strong impression that this was designed by Sharp to be a prop for Kevin McCallister, like the weird Talkboy in Home Alone 2. (But Sharp made a weird twin boombox also called a Twin Cam so I dunno.)
The Slim Cam series definitely had capacitor issues. Like early to mid 90's Macintosh machines these things used SMD caps and of coarse they are starting to leak. I guess I was lucky that at least 2 of the ones I got worked. I got 3 of them. One I got without a battery or charger. Second I got was to get one paired with a charger and third one for the cable you need to connect the charger to the camera. Unnecessary way of obtaining these parts yes but it was actually cheaper then trying to find them on their own at the time. The VL-L53 (I think it was a VL-L53, don't recall. But it was definitely a L5x series) doesn't even power on and one of the capacitors fell off the board while I was swapping it's shell with other internal parts. The L63 seems to work fine but has some slight interference in the camera scene that is noticeable in certain lighting conditions and a L64 appeared to be fully working and doesn't have the interference issues the L63 has. So that's the one I got lucky on. (it happened to be the first camera in the bunch I acquired too!. The others just happened to come included with the accessories I was trying to obtain. :P ) Long story short they are indeed plagued with capacitor problems. There is currently another on eBay right now that has most of it's original accessories. (even the carry bag! 2 of mine came with them). You could try and acquire that one. Contact the seller and ask him to test it. He says untested because dead battery but he doesn't realize the charger can be used to test the camera and he does have the connecting cable for it (seen bundled with the av cables in his pictures). So it's at least possible to convince the seller to attempt testing the camera. It's just a matter of letting him know how to connect the charger to it. Might be worth the effort in case it's a working instance of the camera. It's a bit pricey (around $98 or so) but for an untested camera that's too expensive I think. Given that he does have means of testing it, definitely try to convince him to give it a go. Don't need to get him to find a VHS tape. If the CCD/board works you are good. I can provide the VHS deck from my dead l53 if by some long shot there is an issue with the one that one has. I can almost guarantee the VHS decks are compatible. The VHS mechanisms on them seem to be pretty rock solid though so you probably won't need mine. :P They don't use belts from what I can tell (aside from what kinda looks like a small belt that drives that swing gear that drives the tape reals, but it's got some teeth on it and doesn't appear to be made of rubber) and all 3 VHS mechanisms I've gotten (even the one in the dead L53) seemed to work fine after testing one of the working boards from the L63 or L64 with them. I want to try and find someone to recap mine. But that's gonna be a real chore. The boards on these cameras has a forest of SMD capacitors on them. So having them recapped isn't gonna be cheap it looks like. It's only a matter of time before my L64 goes from perfect working condition to having some kinda of issue. :( Had they went with through hole ones I could have done these myself. But I don't have decent enough soldering equipment to trust working on SMD boards with so I'm not gonna touch them.
Oh man, seeing that Sharp camera takes me back! My mom had a unit like that, and being able to hold it up and tilt the screen down was awesome when you needed an eagle eye shot. A lot easier than the handicam, even the models with the side screens.
if we're speculating, what if the weird one was made to fund the proper one? i think you may be right about a foreign market, and they may have released a cheap version to figure out the kinks and then patched it. after it proved itself to be a successfull product they could have used the revenue to redesign it for the american market, which was already common practice for asian companies like nintendo with the famicom/nes.
Me and my brother used a Sharp ViewCam when we were kids for making lots of dumb videos. But it gave us experience to later create our (mildly) successful youtube channel in 2009. I loved that thing even though it was weird lol
The other issue with zooming was that if you were using the built in mic you almost always had to suffer through several seconds of very loud motor noise recorded on the audio track.
According to the New York Times article "When TV Is A Snap" from 1992, it was $1699 at launch. "A notable innovation in the ever-popular camcorders is Sharp's 8-millimeter Twin-Cam (Model VL-MX7U). Unlike other video cameras intended for home use, it has two separate lenses instead of the usual single lens. The dual-lens feature brings to home video advantages long enjoyed by photographers using interchangable lenses. The options for pictorial composition -- and thus creative expression -- are thus considerably expanded. One of the two lenses is a zoom lens so powerful (12x) that it can take extreme close-ups even from a distance. The other is a wide-angle lens that produces panoramic images. If desired, images from both lenses can be taped simultaneously, with a close-up appearing as an insert in a wide-angle long shot. Further refinements, like stereo sound and a color viewfinder, make the list price of $1,699 seem almost reasonable." (NYT, "When TV Is A Snap", 9/27/1992)
6:37 The picture took me back to a very cool time in my life, reminded me of home videos with the old man and his mates when they just discovered camcorders. We would film fishing, the beach trips (which damaged the cams because of sand).
In my work back in the day we loved the viewcam form factor. You could even use it like a mini LCD TV since the AV cable worked like in and out at same time. It was sad day when Sharp exits the country.
My bet is they put one of their bookshelf stereo industrial designers in charge of the aesthetics. There was a lot of "make it look powerful and futuristic" design posturing starting to happen at that time.
the PiP feature actually upsets me. PiP is supposed to allow you to show two things at once. This one just shows you the same thing twice. And the small picture is in the _middle_? not in, say, a corner, so you can actually *see* both pictures? This is, no joke, the worst PiP I've ever encountered. And I've used Anycasts from back when they were those little briefcase things. It would probably make a little cute sci-fi submarine miniature.
It's breathtakingly useless! There were so many better ways to do it, but I think the problem is that they're using *very* simple circuitry to just cut between the two signals on the fly (like a consumer vision mixer), and it would have required much, much more circuitry to retime the PIP contents, so the only way they could hope of getting something meaningful in the PIP was to just put it right in the center. But then that just suggests they shouldn't have done it at all! I have no idea how this made it off the drawing board once they realized the limitations.
One of the companies that made a similar cam to the Sharp Viewcam, was Sony with the very limited SC series which includes CCD-SC55, CCD-SC65, and sort of the CCD-SC55, which really IMO where really based on the Mavica floppy series cameras they made around the same area.
It looks like something made for the japanese domestic market, but was somehow sold in the rest of the world. They really used to like that kind of weird robot buttons everywhere kinda design.
Yeah I thought the same... so much Japanese products made only for the home market looks weird and wonderful unlike what they sold to the rest of the world. This was probably just one of those that got sold elsewhere
I faintly remember seeing this camera for sale in 1 or 2 issues of the Damark catalog (Remember those?) circa 1993 or 1994. Don't remember the price though.
Back in the day high quality injection molding cost a fortune, and the Twincam has a ton of parts. I am guessing Sharp sold the electronics and parts to a 3rd party company who then made the case.
A lot of capacitors from the 80s-90s died very rapidly because the original recipe for them was lost and an incorrect copy of it was used by manufacturers for a while until the original concoction was rediscovered
i wish i had an uncle and a nearby beach because i had to cut out the segment where i said "it seems like the only purpose of this device is to suspend your uncles head in the middle of a wide shot of a beach"
The little Twincam *screams* Sharp to me. The brown gold color and that font are the EXACT ones on my Sharp CRT. All those fiddly extra and the cyborg toy look? That's because it's SUPER PROFESHONIL
So you are a master of presentation now. What if you put retro technology into the context of autobiography. Maybe I'm projecting, but why is this so damn interesting?
The design of it kind of actually reminds me of one of those 8mm cameras with multiple lenses. Those looked really cool. This could have looked really cool, but it doesnt.
I think you're right. They were going for some kind of nostalgia slightly throwback design, with a turret lens look. That old 8mm film cameras had. Probably the only people who could afford this camera were older folks who were in the prime years of making bank on evey paycheck tell retirement in a few short years. Or had just retired and have money to spend to make videos with their grandchildren now. They remember when cameras looked like this Sharp in their youth.
Yeah, there were a couple that could do it at least, and I registered this fact several years ago and just assumed that every phone with two cameras could do it, but I guess it was actually a special feature on a couple samsungs or something!
Can you open the twin cam and see if there are any factory markings on the circuit boards? Perhaps see if the boards have the same style of silkscreen and routing?
I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I love quirky cameras like this. I think it's innovative for its time and having physical buttons to do so many things make it a great creative tool. "Ugly" is subjective when it comes to technology, everyone has their opinion. I think it's super cool and miss when companies pushed out ideas like this
5:36 whenever you take recordings from these cameras are you ripping the image off of tape or using a line-in connection? I'm curious about your outdoor setup for the latter if that's the case.
It's actually a mix in this case! If I had it my way, I would always rip from the tape, but more often than not the tape mechanism is somewhere between unreliable and broken. It's also much harder to digitize from tape compared to straight composite out, because there's more jitter in the timing and I have to put the signal through a TBC to capture it reliably. There's also the question of whether the tape itself is in perfect condition or if it could be degrading the image. In this case, when I did my first take I recorded on the tape solely, and while ripping it later I found out that the mechanism in this camera drifts, so it only plays for a couple minutes before the image starts degrading horribly. Also, of the two Twincams I have, the only working one is PAL, and none of my other Video8 decks will play that, so I couldn't just rip it in another deck. That performance also had some flaws, so I had to do a second take, and I was really fed up with a number of things and didn't want to chance anything, so... I ran 50 feet of composite cable out my office window, back into a Retrotink 5X, and captured directly in OBS live. However, when you're recording you always want redundancy if possible, so I recorded the second take on tape as well, just in case... and sure enough, when I went back inside, I found that I had run out of hard drive space JUST before I began the PIP segment, and the only copy I had of that part of the performance was on tape. So, I ended up ripping that segment from tape by rewinding and playing it over and over until I got a good copy (probably 3-4 attempts), and that's why the PIP clips look worse than the rest. To date I have not found a good solution for portable composite capture. I know there used to be tons of devices, but (possibly because I just haven't put in enough legwork) I have yet to find one to use with my vintage cameras, which is really a bummer. I'm sure that in 2002 you could buy (for probably $2k-3k) some pro-grade handheld device with composite input and an LCD preview screen that recorded on SD or HDD, and I would love to have exactly that thing, I just haven't found it yet. Also, to power the camera outside, I had a pair of wires gaffer taped to the battery contacts and then twisted onto a 6V wall wart that I ran off a portable lithium pack with inverter.
There was a camcorder for sale here in Japan a few years ago that had a separate inward pointing lens with its own sensor for putting a pip of the dad filming with camera while reacting to his child enjoying a birthday cake or running around at the yearly sports festival.
The Twincam seems like "The Homer" of camcorders. Some senior person at Sharp had a relative that had been begging to design a product and they did whatever that person said no matter how dumb.
that is EXACTLY what i wanted to say about it and forgot, hahaha, dangit!
D'oh! That could certainly be it...
Or it could be designed by committee.. we asked 1000 people type thing.. And it was multiple choice box ticking.. then the results landed on some designers desk with a lot of "it must be" parameters..
I was just recently introducing my children to the (good old) episodes of The Simpsons on Disney+ and: yes hello to the Homer car episode..
All comments on similarity between camcorder and car are best true!
@@CathodeRayDude Me Too!
Open one of the broken ones and see if it’s littered with Sharp references inside!
Exactly what I was thinking. Internally there will likely be some more clues to the origin of this monster.
... Clever unintentional pun LMAO
Good you said broken. I tried opening similar cameras as a kid. One of the few devices that were hard to put back together.
There are so much parts in these things from that time.
@@MrSpacelyy cameras in general are a bitch to repair because of this. It's even worse today. Usually there's a very specific order to the dis- and reassembly of these.
That was a great demo of the poor dynamic range of those cameras. Shooting in noon sun meant the person's eyes would be black holes and their cheeks would be overexposed. They made you appreciate the flat even light of cloudy days.
Yeah my gf was helping me shoot and she said "half your face is completely black" and I said "if it looked any other way I'd be lying, this is what these cameras looked like"
I find it amusing that the NTSC one has an 'color viewfinder' while the PAL one has a 'colour viewfinder'.
It would have been much more amusing had it been the other way around.
Damn, you beat me to it.
We all know, only one of those things defines color or colour. You can call it whatever you want, NTS is never going to give you it twice :)
u know that u is important....hehe
I don't know what's amusing? if the PAL version is from the UK it is colour.
1. The design looks a little like japanese minidisc and hifis from sharp, so it might be targeted to their market.
2. The reason they built it is the same as today's multi-lens feature on modern phones. But back then it was the other way around. Everybody wanted to shoot from distance so zoom with a long focal length was a must. On the other hand this usually ruled out extra wide angle which is much more practical in Japan or Europe where spaces are tighter. If you wanted to have all the family in the frame it was either the wide converter or... this.
Oh yes, I did get a wide converter…
ooh, I have a Sharp MD-MS722 that looks like a slightly less shitty application of that design philosophy (it's metal, and they include a wheel that's actually useful for text input)
@@the-shork I came to post that the camera looked like that exact MD player! Still got mine hah
At the time people said Sony, Hitachi and Panasonic’s success in the west was because they understood how to tone down the designs for western sensibilities.
Sharp were often Japanese market leaders (or inventors of things, like LCD) and designed for Japanese and Asian markets first. That’s what this is.
"greebled" is EXACTLY the word that came to mind, holy shit
"It's really ugly" You take back those words, you charlatan! You knave! That is the most single perfect specimen of camcorder to ever possibly exist! Your mere mortal mind cannot comprehend it's forward looking aesthetic!
This thing looks like you have to tactically reload the batteries/tapes.
Well, now we have smartphones that feature 4 to 6 cameras and nobody laughs at that. Sharp made it long before it become mainstream.
Actually, the more you rag on the camera’s aesthetics,… the more I’m starting to really appreciate it’s aesthetics. It’s kind of wild that it made it through production in the first place.
Same
Nice that it has a line input option. I hear that was quite a common feature elsewhere in the world, but it was a feature that was removed from nearly all UK versions. To do with the import tax I believe - if the camera had input sockets it was classed as a VCR, which meant more import tax had to be paid on it. Result - none but the most expensive UK camcorders had video input sockets.
I can't remember on the MX7, but certainly on the Viewcams, the video input was present but disabled in software. You could reprogram a UK spec (suffix H) machine to be Australian spec (suffix X, IIRC), which was identical apart from allowing external video input and recording.
That was a real bone of contention when mini-DV arrived, because UK models had DV input disabled in firmware (unless you bought the most expensive models). That led to an explosion in small specialist companies offering cracks to reprogram the firmware in your device to re-enable DV input. They weren't cheap either, I think I paid about £70 to get my first mini-DV camcorder (Panasonic NV-DA1) hacked for DV input, and that was the typical market rate.
I remember the hack arrived on a 3.5" floppy, and the label on it warned that if you tried to use it more than once, it would damage the camcorder, presumably by deliberately screwing up the firmware.
@@dunebasher1971 Presumably making a copy of the executable before running it would circumvent this? :)
@@dunebasher1971 I’m 85% sure they just said it, knowing that most people, especially back then, found this stuff daunting and inscrutable and would be scared off by such a threat
Dude you cover some of the most interesting niche video tech on UA-cam, thanks for taking the time to share this stuff. Still incredibly envious of that WVHS deck bruv, but happy it is in good hands.
That's also the same technique used in 3D Modeling... By adding Details the occlusion effect is more noticeable therefore looking much more photorealistic when rendering.
10:00 A PiP input would require a digital frame sync, and those were very expensive at that time. The two sensors in the camera are already genlocked, so they don't need a frame sync.
That chunky "greebling" looks cool. It'd be at home in any cyberpunk dystopia, especially with the extra lens too.
8:53 - curious P in P function: The only reason I can think of why this might have been useful is that back in the day, some of us (old guys who used to own camcorders and sometimes used them in a more advanced manner) used to occasionally set up an ad hoc studio at home, taping something while monitoring it on a TV set attached to the composite jacks. In such a setup, a PiP that showed a close-up of the focal point of the video and could be moved from left to right, could almost make sense with the video in progress being monitored on a bigger screen. Still, I have to admit, it's a barely useful and underwhelming implementation of PiP. It really smacks of a feature added mainly because someone was trying to figure out what to do with an otherwise unused spot on the side of the camcorder.
I'm 46 and think it looks cool and from the future lol a lot better than the boring black thing.
Same here! It conveys a "Steampunk" vibe and feel. If only the buttons were metallic and copper. I can't really down on it because it comes from an era of gaudy.
A lot of electronics of the 90s had that techie feel. But while it has a lot going against it, it has features that were not widely available in the 90s.
They "experiment" a lot of concept consumer products in Japan. Some are specific to the Japanese customer market. I have seen cell phone models that were never sold outside of Japan back in the 90's.
J-Phone and NTT DoCoMo
As someone who was a young adult in that time, the purpose of the different look is to make it look like fancy equipment, and the reserved look of the other camcorders resembled "Cheap" products. You want fancy stuff, make it look fancy with all the "Different" "Metals", and gaudy designs. Basically, it was nothing more than a status statement of the times.
The Sharp actually looks like they were trying to take design cues from professional TV cameras. The aesthetics of it look really similar to the one I operated for a while when I helped with the TV broadcast for a church we attended.
I honestly half-suspect that this was intended for small-budget TV crews. "This is Bob Boblinger, reporting from Farmer Dan's hay barn in back-country Nebraska, where he wants to speak with us about an exciting discovery in the world of manure."
@@absalomdraconis wreckt
This is SOOOOO a Sharp "high end" product. Literally matches their TVs from the era
External PIP would have been hugely complex due to synchronising the video signals. PIP between two CCDs was easier because they would have been running from the same timing source.
Point of reference: $1,700 USD in 1992 would be the equivalent to over $3,300 USD in "today's money".
I'd play with it at Circuit City or Incredible Universe, but that's about it.
Exactly what I needed to brighten up a tough, disappointing, tiring day. I find your voice really relaxing, as well as the content interesting.
Same here. I fall asleep to these sometimes and I don’t mean that in a negative sense…more that I don’t want loud obnoxious videos at night and I keep watching CRD until I’m dropping my phone on my face.
dude i love your channel. this is the real spirit of youtube. what it always was meant to be. broadcasting yourself and the things you like to talk about. beeing yourself no matter of audience size, and talking about things that matter to yourself are qualities that are rare these days. instead of pandering to the audience to encurage growth you just do what you like to do.
i envy you, bravo!
I always had the feeling that 1990s Sharp (and Casio) had products that, instead of being released, just escaped from the R&D department. Like someone from Marketing walked in to the R&D department, saw something fancy but very unfinished and demanded a working marketable product within three months.
Maybe they bought an OEM shell (modified for two lenses) and crammed their tech in it?
This idea, given a bit more thought, would be quite nice. It could have become a nice digital sports finder, where you had a wide angle view of the whole scene and a pip view of the actual frame, so you could see things happen out of view without getting your eyes off the viewfinder.
When you said, "escaped" I pictured someone forgetting to close the window before they left for the day and the thing got out the window and onto store shelves.
Twelve-year-old me was obsessed with this camcorder when it was advertised on the Home Shopping Club (now HSN).
I distinctly recall a demonstration video in which a boy was batting in a baseball game. The wide shot showed him standing at the plate, while a close-up shot of his face was superimposed. I found this _incredibly_ cool.
My recollection is that the unit cost only about $100 (about $200 in today's money) more than an otherwise-similar single-lens Sharp camcorder.
come on now, we all know this just some very clever VFX, as if any company would release such a bizarre product (secretly I want one just so I can take it apart and strap the bits to my head then run around pretending to be a Borg)
Growing up in the tail end of the DV era, i like the look of a silver camcorder with way too many buttons lol
I love you man, you're the most wonderful nerd I've ever had the pleasure of consuming the content of. I hope you continue to be as excellent far into the future!
I remember having a go on one of these way back when they were a thing & the process of lining up wide & tele lenses “ on the fly” seemed much like spinning plates whilst unicycling.Kudos for thinking outside the box even if actual use was insanely awkward. Love your video. Very best wishes.
I *had* one of these when I was in high school! It was amazing. So many edit-in-camera options. The audio quality on the thing was astounding. I had the opposite reaction to the aesthetics at the time. :)
Maybe I’m in the minority, but I think it’s beautiful. I love it’s aesthetic. In fact, the “contemporary” camcorder is ugly to me.
I'm with you on that. Looks great!
I like it too, it's hilarious looking
I agree about the aesthetic comparison but with that said I would rather have the sleeker one because I would feel goofy actually using the dual lense
As a prop it looks pretty cool. As a tool, a bit too much.
I love it
I worked for a Sharp service agent in the UK between 1993-1994, just as the Viewcam range was launched.. We had lots of MX7's come in for warranty repair, and also the cheaper VL-M4 that had a tiny B&W CRT viewfinder and a built-in video light in place of the second lens. I still have my old VL-H400H Viewcam in the loft somewhere. Thanks for the memories!
How many capacitors does the VL-MX7 have? and How many of its circuit boards have SMD caps on them? I'm asking because I just got one recently and want to save it from the recycle bin. Does its circuitry look exactly like the VL-M4? and in advance I know there's a disassembly video on it.
Me, a wealthy adult: "This thing looks cool AF, I want one!"
Me, after watching this video: "Am I a child?"
That’s the best looking camcorder I’ve ever seen! I LOVE IT!
I reflexively clicked the Like button 2 seconds in, because I was so excited to be among the first people to see a new CRD video! :D
I've now seen the whole video and it was delightful. Thank you.
hahahaha, thank you!
I'll be honest, I like the look of it.
All those buttons and dials makes it look super high-tech. The guy behind that thing knows what he's doing!
the p-in-p seems "useful" for sports; zoom in to see the individual player, while recording the entire field of play on the wide.
conceptually yeah, although I think it would be unspeakably difficult to make that look good, haha
@@CathodeRayDude What looked good in the 90s is definitely different from what looks good now (I'm old). Back then I bet people would see that awkward magnifying box on the screen showing a close up of their child's face in a big school auditorium and think it was incredible, just like we thought the star-swipe was incredible.
That was my thought, too. Put this on a tripod up high in the stands at a high school football game. You can catch the snap with a zoom, then switch to the wide angle to see where the receivers go.
It seems so perfect for this use case -- on paper at least -- that I'm surprised that you found no marketing materials that suggested it.
BFG9000 was the very first thought I had when I saw it on screen. Great review, love the content!
The big TwinCam looks like a Panasonic product with that swinging viewfinder.
Actually I'm capturing a video made in the 90's with this camera and transferred to S-VHS, from some friends that played rock music and I have to say that, besides the poor quality of the video 8 image, the camera had the ability to change between the lenses in real time, and have one of them focusing the whole scene, while the other could be offering a close shot of it, which you could monitor previously through the viewfinder, and make the change, say, when the guitar solo began, and have the guitarist instantly on close-up, even allowing some kind of basic graphic transitions between both images. And the built-in mic sounded pretty good too, with a surprising stereo image. I borrowed it from a friend and I have no clue what happened to it, but it was a nice toy that has brought me nice memories...
This is the type of camera you'd see in 90's anime. It fits the time period from that perspective.
Gotta love VWestlife is his treasure trove of random older vintage electronics!
That camera is a modern art masterpiece.
8:40, but the white zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in the red zone!
I remember this one when it came out - it managed to impress me back in the day. BTW, this was styled to look like 8mm film gear. And it does look quite bit like a bolex-paillard film projector, although much cheesier.
I absolutely love how this thing looks!
I get a strong impression that this was designed by Sharp to be a prop for Kevin McCallister, like the weird Talkboy in Home Alone 2. (But Sharp made a weird twin boombox also called a Twin Cam so I dunno.)
The Slim Cam series definitely had capacitor issues. Like early to mid 90's Macintosh machines these things used SMD caps and of coarse they are starting to leak. I guess I was lucky that at least 2 of the ones I got worked. I got 3 of them. One I got without a battery or charger. Second I got was to get one paired with a charger and third one for the cable you need to connect the charger to the camera. Unnecessary way of obtaining these parts yes but it was actually cheaper then trying to find them on their own at the time.
The VL-L53 (I think it was a VL-L53, don't recall. But it was definitely a L5x series) doesn't even power on and one of the capacitors fell off the board while I was swapping it's shell with other internal parts. The L63 seems to work fine but has some slight interference in the camera scene that is noticeable in certain lighting conditions and a L64 appeared to be fully working and doesn't have the interference issues the L63 has. So that's the one I got lucky on. (it happened to be the first camera in the bunch I acquired too!. The others just happened to come included with the accessories I was trying to obtain. :P )
Long story short they are indeed plagued with capacitor problems. There is currently another on eBay right now that has most of it's original accessories. (even the carry bag! 2 of mine came with them). You could try and acquire that one. Contact the seller and ask him to test it. He says untested because dead battery but he doesn't realize the charger can be used to test the camera and he does have the connecting cable for it (seen bundled with the av cables in his pictures). So it's at least possible to convince the seller to attempt testing the camera. It's just a matter of letting him know how to connect the charger to it. Might be worth the effort in case it's a working instance of the camera. It's a bit pricey (around $98 or so) but for an untested camera that's too expensive I think. Given that he does have means of testing it, definitely try to convince him to give it a go. Don't need to get him to find a VHS tape. If the CCD/board works you are good. I can provide the VHS deck from my dead l53 if by some long shot there is an issue with the one that one has. I can almost guarantee the VHS decks are compatible.
The VHS mechanisms on them seem to be pretty rock solid though so you probably won't need mine. :P
They don't use belts from what I can tell (aside from what kinda looks like a small belt that drives that swing gear that drives the tape reals, but it's got some teeth on it and doesn't appear to be made of rubber) and all 3 VHS mechanisms I've gotten (even the one in the dead L53) seemed to work fine after testing one of the working boards from the L63 or L64 with them.
I want to try and find someone to recap mine. But that's gonna be a real chore. The boards on these cameras has a forest of SMD capacitors on them. So having them recapped isn't gonna be cheap it looks like. It's only a matter of time before my L64 goes from perfect working condition to having some kinda of issue. :(
Had they went with through hole ones I could have done these myself. But I don't have decent enough soldering equipment to trust working on SMD boards with so I'm not gonna touch them.
90`s tech assimilated by the Borg
Oh man, seeing that Sharp camera takes me back! My mom had a unit like that, and being able to hold it up and tilt the screen down was awesome when you needed an eagle eye shot. A lot easier than the handicam, even the models with the side screens.
Ooh, take it apart, the caps will tell you who made it. Panasonic uses panasonic caps, Sony uses Elna caps, etc.
And all those caps are equally shitty now :D
Looks like "twin cam" is only good in engines.
I bought one of these in the 80's and I still have it. It was pretty interesting the way you could do wide angle to zoom fades with the two cameras.
These existed in the ‘80s?
Thanks!
Glue some nonfunctioning gears to it and call it steampunk.
god does it even need them, it's already there hahaha.
Damn! Just scrolled down to your comment about 3 minutes after posting mine. Kudos for beating me to it!
Holy crap, that DS9 Romulan senator clip took me _waaaaay_ back
if we're speculating, what if the weird one was made to fund the proper one? i think you may be right about a foreign market, and they may have released a cheap version to figure out the kinks and then patched it. after it proved itself to be a successfull product they could have used the revenue to redesign it for the american market, which was already common practice for asian companies like nintendo with the famicom/nes.
Me and my brother used a Sharp ViewCam when we were kids for making lots of dumb videos. But it gave us experience to later create our (mildly) successful youtube channel in 2009. I loved that thing even though it was weird lol
I really enjoy the editing you do on these, like at
8:03 when you say "I never really liked the look of zooming" and instantly zooms out ^^
The other issue with zooming was that if you were using the built in mic you almost always had to suffer through several seconds of very loud motor noise recorded on the audio track.
According to the New York Times article "When TV Is A Snap" from 1992, it was $1699 at launch.
"A notable innovation in the ever-popular camcorders is Sharp's 8-millimeter Twin-Cam (Model VL-MX7U). Unlike other video cameras intended for home use, it has two separate lenses instead of the usual single lens. The dual-lens feature brings to home video advantages long enjoyed by photographers using interchangable lenses. The options for pictorial composition -- and thus creative expression -- are thus considerably expanded.
One of the two lenses is a zoom lens so powerful (12x) that it can take extreme close-ups even from a distance. The other is a wide-angle lens that produces panoramic images. If desired, images from both lenses can be taped simultaneously, with a close-up appearing as an insert in a wide-angle long shot.
Further refinements, like stereo sound and a color viewfinder, make the list price of $1,699 seem almost reasonable." (NYT, "When TV Is A Snap", 9/27/1992)
It's a work of art.
Please keep making videos. Your videos are calming to watch.
"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
6:37 The picture took me back to a very cool time in my life, reminded me of home videos with the old man and his mates when they just discovered camcorders. We would film fishing, the beach trips (which damaged the cams because of sand).
In my work back in the day we loved the viewcam form factor. You could even use it like a mini LCD TV since the AV cable worked like in and out at same time. It was sad day when Sharp exits the country.
I don't find this so amusing because every modern phone has 3, 4 or even 5 camera sensors.
My bet is they put one of their bookshelf stereo industrial designers in charge of the aesthetics. There was a lot of "make it look powerful and futuristic" design posturing starting to happen at that time.
the PiP feature actually upsets me. PiP is supposed to allow you to show two things at once. This one just shows you the same thing twice. And the small picture is in the _middle_? not in, say, a corner, so you can actually *see* both pictures? This is, no joke, the worst PiP I've ever encountered. And I've used Anycasts from back when they were those little briefcase things.
It would probably make a little cute sci-fi submarine miniature.
It's breathtakingly useless! There were so many better ways to do it, but I think the problem is that they're using *very* simple circuitry to just cut between the two signals on the fly (like a consumer vision mixer), and it would have required much, much more circuitry to retime the PIP contents, so the only way they could hope of getting something meaningful in the PIP was to just put it right in the center. But then that just suggests they shouldn't have done it at all! I have no idea how this made it off the drawing board once they realized the limitations.
1:23 it looks neat, could use it as a prop in some sci-fi movie ha
1:49 ha
One of the companies that made a similar cam to the Sharp Viewcam, was Sony with the very limited SC series which includes CCD-SC55, CCD-SC65, and sort of the CCD-SC55, which really IMO where really based on the Mavica floppy series cameras they made around the same area.
I am learning so many new words from this guy!
my cat loves your videos; he always wants to attack your hands while you're talking
It looks like something made for the japanese domestic market, but was somehow sold in the rest of the world. They really used to like that kind of weird robot buttons everywhere kinda design.
Yeah I thought the same... so much Japanese products made only for the home market looks weird and wonderful unlike what they sold to the rest of the world. This was probably just one of those that got sold elsewhere
Maybe they bought a company and were contractually obligated to put out the other models.
Did you see the camcorder that misubishi made that featured a colour CRT viewfinder?
It uses a colour wheel on the viewfinder.
yes! I know exactly one person who has ever touched one, I think they have a couple, they're usually broken - very very cool!
I faintly remember seeing this camera for sale in 1 or 2 issues of the Damark catalog (Remember those?) circa 1993 or 1994.
Don't remember the price though.
I loved the Damark catalog
Back in the day high quality injection molding cost a fortune, and the Twincam has a ton of parts. I am guessing Sharp sold the electronics and parts to a 3rd party company who then made the case.
A lot of capacitors from the 80s-90s died very rapidly because the original recipe for them was lost and an incorrect copy of it was used by manufacturers for a while until the original concoction was rediscovered
My therapist: Big Head Cathode Ray Dude isn't real, he can't hurt you.
Big Head Cathode Ray Dude: 9:00
i wish i had an uncle and a nearby beach because i had to cut out the segment where i said "it seems like the only purpose of this device is to suspend your uncles head in the middle of a wide shot of a beach"
The little Twincam *screams* Sharp to me. The brown gold color and that font are the EXACT ones on my Sharp CRT. All those fiddly extra and the cyborg toy look? That's because it's SUPER PROFESHONIL
oh the engineering meetings regarding having PinP must have been a fun
I actually like the "greebled" design of the camera, I think it fits with the dual camera barrels.
You're a great narrator. I could listen to you read the back of a shampoo bottle and be wholly entertained for hours.
It's funny that you threw out that toy company theory. When you introduced the camera I was reminded of the Talkboy from the 90s.
It looks like the space ship from Life of Brian (that I assume Terry Gilliam designed).
So you are a master of presentation now. What if you put retro technology into the context of autobiography. Maybe I'm projecting, but why is this so damn interesting?
I cheered when you said “greebled” because it was the first word that came to mind for me as well
The design of it kind of actually reminds me of one of those 8mm cameras with multiple lenses. Those looked really cool. This could have looked really cool, but it doesnt.
I think you're right. They were going for some kind of nostalgia slightly throwback design, with a turret lens look. That old 8mm film cameras had. Probably the only people who could afford this camera were older folks who were in the prime years of making bank on evey paycheck tell retirement in a few short years. Or had just retired and have money to spend to make videos with their grandchildren now. They remember when cameras looked like this Sharp in their youth.
Honestly i love this camera i think its truly beautiful
Sorry, but it looks totally awesome to me :D
phones can record both front and rear at the same time? My One Plus 5T can't either
Yeah, there were a couple that could do it at least, and I registered this fact several years ago and just assumed that every phone with two cameras could do it, but I guess it was actually a special feature on a couple samsungs or something!
Can you open the twin cam and see if there are any factory markings on the circuit boards? Perhaps see if the boards have the same style of silkscreen and routing?
I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I love quirky cameras like this. I think it's innovative for its time and having physical buttons to do so many things make it a great creative tool. "Ugly" is subjective when it comes to technology, everyone has their opinion. I think it's super cool and miss when companies pushed out ideas like this
5:36 whenever you take recordings from these cameras are you ripping the image off of tape or using a line-in connection? I'm curious about your outdoor setup for the latter if that's the case.
It's actually a mix in this case! If I had it my way, I would always rip from the tape, but more often than not the tape mechanism is somewhere between unreliable and broken. It's also much harder to digitize from tape compared to straight composite out, because there's more jitter in the timing and I have to put the signal through a TBC to capture it reliably. There's also the question of whether the tape itself is in perfect condition or if it could be degrading the image.
In this case, when I did my first take I recorded on the tape solely, and while ripping it later I found out that the mechanism in this camera drifts, so it only plays for a couple minutes before the image starts degrading horribly. Also, of the two Twincams I have, the only working one is PAL, and none of my other Video8 decks will play that, so I couldn't just rip it in another deck.
That performance also had some flaws, so I had to do a second take, and I was really fed up with a number of things and didn't want to chance anything, so... I ran 50 feet of composite cable out my office window, back into a Retrotink 5X, and captured directly in OBS live.
However, when you're recording you always want redundancy if possible, so I recorded the second take on tape as well, just in case... and sure enough, when I went back inside, I found that I had run out of hard drive space JUST before I began the PIP segment, and the only copy I had of that part of the performance was on tape. So, I ended up ripping that segment from tape by rewinding and playing it over and over until I got a good copy (probably 3-4 attempts), and that's why the PIP clips look worse than the rest.
To date I have not found a good solution for portable composite capture. I know there used to be tons of devices, but (possibly because I just haven't put in enough legwork) I have yet to find one to use with my vintage cameras, which is really a bummer. I'm sure that in 2002 you could buy (for probably $2k-3k) some pro-grade handheld device with composite input and an LCD preview screen that recorded on SD or HDD, and I would love to have exactly that thing, I just haven't found it yet.
Also, to power the camera outside, I had a pair of wires gaffer taped to the battery contacts and then twisted onto a 6V wall wart that I ran off a portable lithium pack with inverter.
No freaking way, I just bought one of these, and its on the way. Cant wait to geter goin
Have you considered sending the other twin cam to Mr Carlson's lab or bigclive as a collab to get it working?
A collab like that would be awesome 😎
There was a camcorder for sale here in Japan a few years ago that had a separate inward pointing lens with its own sensor for putting a pip of the dad filming with camera while reacting to his child enjoying a birthday cake or running around at the yearly sports festival.